Book Riot’s Deals of the Day for October 11, 2024 include my memoir, Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experiment, which is only $3.99 for the Kindle. (The hardback is only $17.62, which is 39% off the list price.)
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My memoir, Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experiment, which recounts my 30-year tenure as a research subject in an unprecendented University of California, Berkeley longitudinal study that sought to predict who over 100 Berkeley kids, including me, would grow up to be, is 50% off for Barnes & Noble Book Haul 2024.
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I’m delighted to share that I’ll be a Participant at the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma’s Reporting Safely in Crisis Zones Course for Freelance Journalists in New York City this fall. The Dart Center is an amazing organization, and this course looks incredible. I’m really looking forward to this experience.
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New York Times bestselling author Dani Shapiro interviewed me about my life story and my memoir, Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experiment, for her widely-listened-to Family Secrets podcast. The episode is entitled “I Was 758,” and it’s available on most podcast distributing platforms. Thank you to Dani for doing this intimate interview. You can buy Data Baby from the retailer of your choice here and read more about it here.
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This story was written by me and originally published on Salon in July 2001.
These days, it seems like the Los Angeles Police Department has got a thing for porn. Understand, the kind of porn the LAPD wants is not just any kind. When it comes to the LAPD and porn, the LAPD wants the nastiest, dirtiest, most extreme porn around.
"What kind of porn is that?" you might ask. (They are, after all, the police.)
The kind of porn the LAPD wants has naked women fisting each other, and guys peeing on girls, and 80 men masturbating onto the face of one kneeling woman. That's the kind of porn the LAPD wants.
Got any?
The adult-movie industry does. That's why, on Dec. 15, 2000, a posse of L.A. cops showed up with a search warrant at the San Fernando Valley offices of a man who goes by the name of Seymore Butts to get a fisting tape they wanted.
And that's why on May 16, 2001, they pulled over the car of a man named Jeff Steward in nearby Woodland Hills because they heard he was their guy when it came to a popular new porn genre called bukkake that involves one woman, 100 or so men and lots of semen.
As payment for the porn, the LAPD handed Butts two counts of obscenity. It's likely Steward will be awarded a few counts as well.
And it is quite possible the LAPD will be coming back real soon to Porn Valley, USA, for more. Because these days, it looks as if the LAPD has a big hard-on when it comes to hardcore porno.
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Seymore Butts lives in a low-lying ranch-style home behind a locked gate at the end of a driveway in the Northridge area of the San Fernando Valley. Outside is a kidney-shaped pool, in the living room is a porn-star girlfriend and in front of a TV is Butts himself.
Seymore Butts is famous. Famous for being a pioneer of gonzo porn in the '90s, setting off with video cam in hand to chronicle sexploits that, as his name implies, involved more than the missionary position. Famous again in the mid-'90s for a porn movie in which his girlfriend gave a blow job to a fireman -- an on-duty fireman -- on the back of a fire truck.
Now Butts may become more famous, perhaps even most famous, for his most provocative production to date.
It's called "Tampa Tushy-Fest Part 1."
In this particular filmic endeavor, two female porn stars, who go by the names Alisha Klass and Chloe, can be seen convening in a Florida hotel room. Klass and Chloe are two of the adult movie industry's "anal queens," postfeminist sexplorers who take howlingly orgasmic pleasure in their experiments at the anal end of extreme porn.
Once situated before Butts' camera, they embark on a trip to the outer reaches of the extreme sex frontier. In a frenzy of erotic competition and mutual admiration, the women end up putting their whole fists into each other's orifices to loudly orgasmic fanfare.
This is where Seymore's trouble began.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Adam Whitney Glasser was born and raised in the Bronx until 13, the Jewish son of a clothing-company sales-rep father and a secretary mother. When the family moved to Santa Monica, Calif., Glasser discovered he preferred girls to books, lost his virginity at 14 and found a cache of his father's adult videos. He was disappointed when he did; as he says now, "I didn't know my Dad just didn't have good taste in porn."
After graduation, Glasser hosted nightclubs and went to junior college, but he quickly came to appreciate where his true interests in life lay. "Once I started dating a lot of women," he says, "I always kind of dated a lot of women." By 24, Glasser had become a personal trainer and opened a gym in Los Angeles. To make extra money on the side he rented the gym out as a movie location, and one night in 1990 in a video store he espied John Stagliano. And Glasser knew Stagliano was the king of the then new field of gonzo-porn.
In the '70s, adult movies meant relatively big-budget affairs shot on film stock, but in the '80s, the advent of cheap and portable video meant anyone could make a porn movie. Stagliano, as a veritable porn pioneer, had created a persona to match the new medium -- "Buttman," a pervert adventurer documenting his "real" sex life so guys back home could watch directly through the eyes of both porn-maker and performer. (A double shooter, really.)
As Buttman's videos gained in popularity among porn consumers, they inspired a new generation of DIY porn auteurs.
Glasser was to be one of them. He offered his gym to Stagliano as a set, and the day Buttman came to film, Glasser says, "I watched, and after that day, I thought, I'm in the wrong business."
These days, Adam Glasser is 37 and known to a certain segment of the world as Seymore Butts. Over the last decade, the porn industry has grown up with him -- into big business. America's hunger for pornography has led to the annual shelling out of billions of dollars on adult videos, erotic magazines, pay-per-view adult programming and porn Web sites. (The exact figure, while widely estimated in the range of $10 billion to $11 billion, is currently being contested by Forbes.com, which estimates it between $2.6 billion and $3.9 billion.) The number of porn videos produced each year has surpassed the 10,000 mark.
Riding this wave, Glasser has made some 90 films, and thinks, after a considerable pause, he has slept with perhaps 400 or 500 women. Today, he is tan and muscular, although his dark hair is going gray in parts and there are lines around his eyes. But if you look at the movies Seymore Butts made, you see why he became as popular as he did.
In videos with titles like "Buttholes Are Forever," and "Tushy Con Carne," Seymore Butts sports a cat-that-ate-the-canary grin. He is no stud workhorse at plow, but a man relishing a "spontaneous" sex life with girlfriends and gal-pals. The women apparently enjoy themselves as well. Butts' camera scans their faces almost anxiously for their reactions. Glasser says: "I hated when it looked to me like the woman wasn't enjoying herself, [when] it looked like work, like she was waiting for the paycheck."
Seymore and Adam -- they just wanted girls to have fun.
Glasser had his first big hit when he hooked up with Shane, one of several now ex-girlfriend costars. In his mind, they were the "Burns and Allen of porn." Together they entered the porn pantheon in 1994 with "Seymore and Shane: Playing With Fire," in which Shane engaged in her fireman tryst. After the movie's release, the city of Elmont, N.Y., filed suit, asking $172 million in reparations for the indignity of having its fireman debauched, its firehouse converted into a porn set and its station emblem displayed on-screen. (The suit was eventually dropped, and the credited "Marv the Fireman" resigned.)
Over the years, as a pornographer, Glasser had other encounters with the law. In one, at a Los Angeles porn convention in the summer of 1998, Alisha Klass and two other women were charged with obscenity when the women exposed themselves, and Klass united a cigar and her butt in an ode to Monica Lewinsky. "She doesn't remember completely whether she stuck it in her ass or just put it around her ass," Glasser says today. The case was later dropped.
So by the fall of 1998, when he was in a Tampa hotel room with Klass and Chloe, it must have seemed only natural to be pushing the envelope while making porn. That day, someone had brought up fisting, as in the insertion of the fist into the vagina or anus for erotic purposes. The practice, while not unknown in certain parts of the gay and S/M communities, is for many, even in porn, considered extreme.
"We were sitting around talking about what we would do in this girl-girl scene, and I said I would love to do that," Klass recalls. She was Butts' girlfriend, a relationship repeatedly consummated on camera, in "Behind the Sphinc Door" and "Best of Bunghole Fever," among other videos. The brunet has begun some moves into the world of mainstream filmmaking, including a small part in Wayne Wang's recent "The Center of the World" and a rumored fling with Bruce Willis, documented in the tabloids. ("I'm not in love with Bruce," she told the World Entertainment News Network. "It was all fun for me and now it's over.")
Neither Chloe nor Klass was an average gal. Chloe was already a devout fister in her private sex life, and Klass is famous for talents like self-fisting and accoutrements like a tattoo on her rear reading "SEYMORE BUTTS." When it came to fisting, as a stripper Klass had done research. "Sometimes I'd be onstage and put my hand in my ass, and sometimes people were shocked by it and sometimes they liked it," she reports matter-of-factly.
For their scene in "Tampa Tushy-Fest," Klass and Chloe do seem to like it. To begin with, Klass vaginally fists Chloe with one fist. Next up, Klass vaginally fists Chloe with two fists. After that, Chloe anally fists Klass with one fist. And, as a finale, Chloe anally fists Klass with one fist while Klass vaginally fists herself.
To describe Klass and Chloe's performance this way, of course, removes their actions from the context in which they were created. There are plenty of other interesting moments in "Tampa Tushy-Fest": Klass' bong-toking, her substantial "squirting" and her proclamation to Chloe's crotch, "I wanna stick my whole head up there!"
There is orgasmic moaning to consider for consensuality, Chloe's hand instructions to be debated as points of education and, for political significance, the post-fisting moment near the end when Alisha turns to the camera and crows, "Fuck, yeah, that's girl power!"
"It was a really positive, fun thing," Klass says of the fist fest. For her, it was "enlightening" and "empowering."
- - - - - - - - - - - -
In the five years or so preceding, porn makers had already been producing increasingly more extreme porn. Take "The Houston 500," in which porn-star Houston has sex with an alleged 620 men. (There were actually only about 125 men involved.) Or "Girls Who Puke," in which several women have sex and then, as one might surmise, vomit. Before the current "Tampa Tushy-Fest" imbroglio, there was Anabolic Productions' notorious "Rough Sex 1," which was recalled after female stars claimed they'd been physically abused.
To stay competitive with the Web, where anything goes, shock-porn grew in the 1990s under the benevolent shade of Bill Clinton's perceived hands-off policy toward porn. Porn flourished under the benign rule of a president with whom some porn makers felt a certain kinship in the erotic dalliances arena. By the end of the decade, porn sales were growing larger, and the perception by some in porn was that legal risks were becoming rarer.
But most of those in the porn industry still stayed away from certain erotic acts, those themes and images traditionally considered taboo in commercial porn and most likely to garner porn prosecutions. Simulated rape is one; the pairing of S/M practices and sexual intercourse is another. Other classic porno no-no's include bestiality, implied incest, insinuated pedophilia ... and fisting.
With "Tampa Tushy-Fest" in his hands, Butts got to thinking: What was so wrong with fisting? "I wanted people to give it a chance," he cries plaintively now.
"I called up one of my lawyers," Butts recounts, "and I said, 'Can you please refer me to the specific legal reference to fisting? Please just tell me the page?' And he says, 'Well, you know, it's obscene per se.' And of course, I had to get the definition of obscene per se, which means it is likely to be found obscene. Which to me is just utterly gobbledygook! I mean, what the fuck are they talking about?"
What the fuck they were talking about is, in fact, the sanctioned method used to assess obscenity, dictated by a 1973 U.S. Supreme Court case called Miller vs. California. According to it, a work is obscene if it appeals to "the prurient interest" as dictated by "contemporary community standards"; if it exhibits "in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable state law"; and if it lacks "serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value." Then, and only then, is it obscene. Since all pornography, by definition, appeals to the prurient interest, one could perhaps forgive Butts for doubting that a judge or jury would find the taboo practice of fisting any more shocking than a garden-variety porno act like double penetration.
Butts decided to cut two versions of "Tampa Tushy-Fest" -- one with fists, one without. Then he sent several thousand fist-filled copies out to retailers across the United States. A week later, his phone began ringing. "What the fuck do you think you're doing?" demanded one retailer. He received 50 calls about the tape, Butts estimates, half negative. If they didn't want it, he told them, all they had to do was send it back, and he'd send the edited version in exchange.
Ten percent sent back the original "Tampa Tushy-Fest." "To this day," Glasser says, "the number of requests we get for that movie are great."
Some porn producers were angry, believing Adam put them all at risk. But at the 2000 Adult Video News Awards, "Tampa Tushy-Fest" won "Best Gonzo." Klass and Chloe, for their part, won "Best All-Girl Sex Scene."
The fisting debate died down.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
That is until 8 a.m., Dec. 15, 2000, when several members of the Los Angeles Police Department showed up at Seymore Inc. in the town of Chatsworth, on the far western edge of the San Fernando Valley.
They were looking for porn.
The LAPD served Adam Glasser's 69-year-old mother, Lila, now a divorcée and the company bookkeeper, with a search warrant. Glasser was called to come down. He says the cops acted reluctant, like they were fans of his -- and of his girls.
The police left with the master tapes for "Tampa Tushy-Fest Part 1" and the yet-to-be-released "Tampa Tushy-Fest Part 2."
They'd let him know by mail, they said, if he'd be charged.
Three months later, on March 16, 2001, Butts was charged with two counts of obscenity: "distribution of obscene material" and "advertising of obscene matter for sale." The charges were misdemeanors, threatening a $1,000 fine and six months in jail. As secretary of the company, Lila was charged along with her son.
The boys in blue, it turns out, had had their eye on Butts for nearly two years, according to court records.
Upon receiving an anonymous tip in January 1999 that there was fisting to be found in "Tampa Tushy-Fest," two vice officers began surveillance of Butts and company. After a few days in January staking out, appropriately enough, the back door at Seymore Inc., the officers ordered themselves a Seymore Butts catalog in February. In March, an officer obtained his own trial membership at SeymoreButts.com, and in May, an officer purchased a copy of "Tampa Tushy-Fest" online. After a bit more surveillance in June, in July the cops took a personal field trip to a Los Angeles porn convention.
The LAPD stayed on the case. In what may have been one of the more spectacular perks ever accorded working police officers, members of the vice squad traveled to the Adult Video News Awards in Las Vegas in January 2000 to watch Butts and his muses accept their porn awards. An officer then bought a second copy of the video in May, and in November, the LAPD finally got its warrant.
Implicit in the investigation was what Butts' lawyer told him: Fisting is obscene.
What Adam wants to know, like Nancy Kerrigan, is "Why?"
Sexpert Tristan Taormino, after all, announced last spring in her Village Voice sex column that fisting has gone mainstream. "Fisting is not just for muff-divers anymore," she decreed. There have been other fisting films made since, including Chloe's unmistakably titled "The Fist, the Whole Fist, and Nothing But the Fist," from Elegant Angel.
"You think they'd go to the scene where the nun is raped in the wheelchair and then thrown in the swimming pool," Butts says darkly, referring to a film by a rival producer.
Because these days, extreme porn is all around him.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Five months later, the LAPD was back in the valley. Because on May 16, 2001, the LAPD decided to add "American Bukkake" to its porn collection. If the department was developing a taste for extreme porn, then why not bukkake?
Bukkake is the deformed, molested stepchild of traditional smut. The tale told in porn circles is that bukkake was born in ancient Japan as punishment for adulterous women. Taken to a cave, bound and forced to kneel, she would then endure all the village men masturbating onto her face.
Bukkake lives on in present-day Japan as a porn genre. In its classic form, no one touches, no one speaks. With a clap, the loincloth-clad men stand. With a clap, they remove their loincloths. With a clap, they throw their loincloths in the air to shout, "Banzai!"
Then the bukkake-ing begins.
In hindsight, one supposes the American porn industry and bukkake were destined to meet. It was 1999 when Jeff Steward, who owns JM Productions, the Chatsworth-based porn production company, came into possession of a Japanese bukkake tape. Not long after, the "American Bukkake" series was spawned.
Every third month, 60 to 100 men have been showing up for bukkake, American-style, on Wednesday nights at a North Hollywood sound stage. Its mostly amateur male performers are brought in through advertisements in Los Angeles weeklies and a busy "bukkake hotline." The men bring proof of a negative HIV test. They are paid $35 each.
By last September, according to video tracking done by Adult Video News, "American Bukkake" was proving quite popular among U.S. consumers. The February 2001 issue of AVN lists "American Bukkake 11" as the seventh most popular video sold the week of November 2000.
The day "American Bukkake 11" was shot last September, some 80 men -- and this reporter -- made their way to North Hollywood. Waiting in a threadbare holding room, the men were white and black, Asian and Hispanic, short and tall, fat and skinny, handsome and not. They were handed black garbage bags for their belongings. Then they stood waiting in the crowded room in their underwear.
Many of the men wore masks or bandannas to hide their faces. Some of them kept their socks on. One was a midget.
Kiki D'Aire was the bukkake girl that night. A sweet-faced and Vargas-bodied blond porn star, D'Aire has appeared in roughly 100 adult videos, among them a number at the extreme end, from "Missionary Position: Impossible" to "White Trash Whore 19." She is the cheery type of 24-year-old who makes people feel fine about everything, even the prospect of 80 men about to orgasm on her visage.
D'Aire entered the large stage-area room wrapped in a red silk robe and asked for vodka before the bukkake began. The set behind her was that of a business office, and for the movie's opening scene, D'Aire masturbated alone on top of the desk while the men waited testily in the next room, their eager hooting now muffled.
Filming D'Aire was "American Bukkake" director Jim Powers, a good-humored stockbroker turned porn director. He is known for shooting some of the most shocking porn being made today -- "Freaks & Geeks"; "Fatter, Balder, Uglier"; "Perverted Stories." The black T-shirt he wore that evening read "Can't Hold Back the Demons."
D'Aire was escorted from the room. The bukkake men were funneled in. When D'Aire was brought back, the men cheered. One man, in a Darth Vader mask, breathed heavily through his vents.
"You guys are turning me on so much!" D'Aire announced to the crowd.
Powers implored the men, "Please try to come on her face!"
The group was directed to take off their underwear en masse. At Powers' prompt, they threw their boxers and BVDs in D'Aire's direction, shouting, "Banzai!" D'Aire giggled.
Powers emphatically coached the men, "When you're done coming, jump back!"
D'Aire sat naked on a towel down on the floor. The men formed concentric circles around her. For the next two hours, the men masturbated from ladders and on desks, jockeying for closer position.
D'Aire encouraged them. "Oh, yeah," she said, her eyes closed.
The men were generally orderly. It was, for the most part, quiet.
Of those I talked to afterward, one man told me, "It was a lifelong fantasy to do something like that." Another said, "I don't consider it degrading. I don't want to degrade anyone." Another revealed, "It's a way of being a pervert but not really hurting anyone." Another confided, "I'm not involved with anyone right now."
And one discovered, "For me, standing around jerking off with a bunch of guys isn't exactly my fantasy."
In the end, D'Aire left for home with $500.
A girlfriend of D'Aire's, who had done a bukkake, told her beforehand that bukkake was "the easiest $500 in the universe." Looking back, today D'Aire judges bukkake hilarious.
"If you go in there and have fun and treat it like this humorous thing, you'll have a good time," she advises.
What was on her mind during the bukkake?
"What was going through my head was how absurd the whole experience is, how wacky it is that men are so in awe of a girl that they're willing to stand next to 60 other guys jacking off," D'Aire replied. "Two years ago if someone told me I was going to be sitting on the floor waiting for 70 men to come on my face and hair, I would've thought they were crazy. But, you realize there's a place for everybody in this world sexually."
She added, "I woke up the next day and my hair was soft. Semen is full of protein."
D'Aire is very open-minded.
She will tell you she controlled what happened that evening. She believes strongly there are more important things in the world than someone who took so many, in her words, "shots to the face."
If you're going to have fantasies, you have to acknowledge that fantasies aren't always nice, D'Aire says. That is where people have a hard time, really, with porn, she says, because it is happening but at the same time it is not.
When you bring a fantasy to life that way, says D'Aire, sometimes it clouds the issue.
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On May 16, Jeff Steward was pulled over by an LAPD car outside his Woodland Hills home. In January, someone -- likely a policeman, as the same pseudonym was used in the Seymore Butts case -- bought two Steward-produced videos, "American Bukkake 11" and "Liquid Gold 5," a peeing tape, through his Web site.
Now, the police had a search warrant for the same videos and wanted to search Steward's car, home and office. As he was being pulled over, Steward's wife, driving their 15-year-old son to school, was also detained, she says, by a total of 10 police cars.
Steward says he was taken back to his home in a police cruiser, where 20 LAPD officers searched his house. They retrieved invoices and fliers for those videos purchased through his Web site. Steward says he repeatedly volunteered to the LAPD that the things they were looking for -- three copies apiece of "American Bukkake 11" and "Liquid Gold 5" -- were at his office in Chatsworth.
The officers finally followed him there. He gave them the tapes they wanted. They left, pornos in hand. Soon, Steward may be getting a letter, letting him know if he will be charged with obscenity.
Four days after Steward's run-in with the police, the New York Times Magazine ran a cover story by Frank Rich profiling the adult-movie industry. The cover's headline was "The World's Most Profitable Back Lot," and it noted below, "There's no business like porn business." The essay posited that porn is a business, run by businessmen, who happen to trade in sex.
In an echo of Rich's thesis, Steward himself informed the police, "I have done nothing wrong. I'm a businessman." And at present, as a businessman, Steward defends his work at the extreme end of porn in nakedly capitalist terms. "This is no different than people selling cars at a car lot," Steward says exasperatedly.
The product he pushes, he says, is no different from the rest of the products of pop culture, like the gross-out humor being offered from cable channels to movie theaters. "It's like 'Jackass' on MTV," says Steward. "Some guy swims in feces on MTV, and that's OK. But for a girl to swallow 80 loads of cum is obscene? I don't think so."
After all, when it comes to bukkake, Steward says, he has moved some 200,000 copies already. JM Productions is only up to "American Bukkake 14," and Steward isn't even the only producer making it. The same day teward encountered the LAPD, Jim Powers was back shooting another bukkake that night in North Hollywood.
According to AVN.com, Powers declared on the set, "We're doing this for all of America."
Of bukkake, the businessman says, "If people didn't want it, it wouldn't be made."
- - - - - - - - - - - -
The case of Adam Glasser, who estimates his company earned $1.6 million last year, is scheduled to start in October. Fortunately for Glasser, he has found himself a lawyer with fisting experience. In 1976, attorney Roger Diamond defended the maker of "Plunge 1," a gay fisting film, and won. Diamond says with confidence, "This thing will be a trip down memory lane."
Steward insists, "I didn't do anything wrong." He, like Glasser, with lawyer Alan Gelbard, plans to go to trial, if necessary, rather than cop a plea. He would be fighting for his First Amendment rights, but for his finances as well. Porn makers who take guilty pleas may face fatally high financial penalties if federal agents later pick up the cases of those who already have state obscenity convictions.
Several porn companies, though, are already discontinuing their extreme video lines. Metro Video's "The World's Biggest Gangbang 3" is no longer available at an adult video store near you. And the porn industry is still trying to figure out if, as they fear, the advent of George W. Bush and his unabashedly moralistic attorney general, John Ashcroft, will generate a conservative trickle-down effect when it comes to obscenity prosecutions, with extreme porn the Achilles' heel for the entire industry.
"This is a crackdown," proclaims criminal defense attorney Jeffrey Douglas, who works regularly with the adult-movie industry and sits on the ACLU's Southern California board of directors. As Douglas sees it, the LAPD was just lying in wait for the likes of Ashcroft, hoping that with Bush in office more federal monies will become available for obscenity prosecutions.
The LAPD vice squad, believes Douglas, is hoping extreme porn will lead to easy convictions, resulting in bigger budgets and providing them sought-after respect. "If all you do all day long is watch X-rated movies and search porn Web sites," Douglas says scornfully, "it's harder to get status amongst your colleagues."
Regardless, pornographers pushing the obscenity envelope didn't foresee that this day would come, says Douglas. "I've been at meetings and events where, if you're talking to a 25-year-old porn-maker about federal prosecutions for obscenity, you might as well be talking about the Spanish-Mexican War," he says ruefully.
And with extreme porn, hypothesizes Douglas, a conservative government struggling for a popular foothold could find the perfect political tool. "In order to pursue obscenity prosecution, you need the convergence of two things," Douglas explains. "You need to have both an ideological commitment and a political payoff." Extreme porn would provide a bone to throw the rabidly anti-porn right-wing constituencies who helped Bush into office, as well as an easily demonized enemy to fight against for mainstream support.
Nevertheless, "Tampa Tushy-Fest," says Douglas, isn't obscene by today's community standards. "If what's available to California consumers and on the Internet is taken into account, then Adam should get a written apology," he says.
The LAPD, for its part, says this is all just business as usual. "I've been doing these type of investigations for the last 16 years," says Detective Steve Takeshita, who is overseeing the latest obscenity cases. "This is standard practice."
Sex in the bedroom may have gotten wilder but, Takeshita asserts, that doesn't make movies featuring provocative sexual content any less obscene when distributed. "What two consenting adults do in the privacy of their own home is between them," he says. "As soon as that activity is distributed publicly, that's where obscenity statutes come into practice."
Regardless of the result of the "Plunge 1" case, Takeshita predicts "Tampa Tushy-Fest" is going down, based on his previous experiences with porn. "I think it will be found to be obscene because of past cases that we've done," he says confidently.
Was the LAPD pressured by the federal government? Takeshita says no way. "The LAPD doesn't receive direction on how to do investigation from the feds," Takeshita snaps. "We are not doing anything we haven't done for the last 16 years or even longer." (The investigation of Seymore Butts, it should be noted, began in the Clinton era.)
Deborah Sanchez, the prosecuting attorney in the Glasser case, agrees with the LAPD. What's new is only that the cases are going to trial, she says. "We've prosecuted dozens of obscenity cases," she explains, "but we've always gotten pleas. This is getting attention now that the city attorney is involved."
Sanchez asserts pornographers like Glasser, who push the limits of porn, won't be able to hide behind the First Amendment in court. "From what I've seen," Sanchez says of Glasser's tape, "this goes beyond what the First Amendment covers." The porn industry, Sanchez says, knows full well the unwritten rules of what they cannot do without risking prosecutions. "The industry knew there are things you just don't distribute."
It remains unclear why 100 men masturbating on a woman is less protected by the First Amendment than, say, three men doing the same thing. It's a state of affairs that only serves to illuminate that, when the subject is porno, the criterion of "community standards" becomes increasingly hard to define.
If extreme porn is the adult industry's indirect attempt to narrow the definition of obscenity further to give themselves greater freedoms, Sanchez says, it will backfire: "They want to see if they can test the waters and push the boundaries a little more as far as the First Amendment."
Sanchez expects to win -- "Juries have sided with us," she says -- and she promises that the city will give the producers more of the same if porn continues to test the obscenity limits of adult video in the future. "It's going to continue to be prosecuted regardless of whether Glasser is convicted or not," she says. "If others are distributing videos with bestiality, fisting, defecation, [they are] going to be prosecuted."
Not everyone in the porn world disagrees. "We've had a free ride for a long time," concedes self-appointed porn spokesman William Margold these days, somewhat wistfully. The act of bukkake, he says, encapsulates what's gone wrong with porn.
"I think the biggest thing bukkake proves is that the adult-movie industry has forgotten how to create," Margold sighs. "When you've forgotten how to create, you go through the motions over and over and over again."
But that's not how Steward and Butts and their cohort see the world. "I'm innocent of any wrongdoing and I'm going to fight," pledges Steward. "Why do people have the right to watch what they want to watch in the privacy of their own home?" he asks rhetorically. "That answer is we live in the United States of America."
Porn producer Rob Black, head of Extreme Associates, has since searched his own online buying records looking for the same pseudonymous "Steven Peterson" of the Butts and bukkake cases. It turns out Peterson had already paid Black a visit. The movie purchased was "In the Days of Whore," and, as Black points out, it is not just any video. The finale was shot in a church and features a multi-money shot accessorized with urine and a crucifix.
"We extend our arms openly with a warm embrace for the consequences to come," Black taunts the LAPD from his Web site. "Give us a call if you want to purchase any other products!"
In a plea for support on AVN.com, Glasser is seeking support from porn friends and fans. He asks that distributors push his product more aggressively, retailers introduce their customers to his videos and, "last, but certainly not least, I simply ask fans to whack off a little more!"
Already, Court TV is calling Seymore Butts.
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This is an excerpt from my memoir, Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experiment. You can order a copy here.
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I thought it would be interesting to write about the strip clubs in the North Beach neighborhood of San Francisco. I was curious about these enigmatic clubs on Broadway that I had seen but into which I had never entered. As a kid in the back seat of my parents’ Dart, I had been driven through San Francisco and spotted The Condor (which, in 1964, had become the country’s first fully topless nightclub). Out front, a towering sign featured a supersized blonde, impossibly busty. Her name, I would find out later, was Carol Doda. She wore a black bikini with blinking red lights for nipples.
Doda was the opposite of my mother and her friends—they were feminists who viewed makeup, heavily styled hair, and revealing clothes as tools the patriarchy used to subjugate and objectify women. But Doda wasn’t anyone’s tool; she was a legend. A San Francisco Art Institute dropout, she had become America’s first topless dancer of note, her surgically enhanced breasts billed as “the new Twin Peaks of San Francisco.” When I was in graduate school, I had seen an episode of HBO’s “Real Sex” about strippers, and I had been struck by the revelation that strip clubs were places where intimacy was for sale. Sure, it was transient, transactional, and most often conducted between a guy with a handful of dollar bills and a dancer in a G-string and not much else who twirled seductively around a pole on a stage, but there was something real about it, I sensed. Or was there? I wanted to find out. The strip club dancers reminded me of the girls I had hung out with in high school, whom everyone else had deemed slutty. These women were powerful, too, in control, the love object I aspired to be, or seemed like it. Intimacy, that for which I had craved as a little girl, was their hustle.
“Oh, my god, Susannah, make up your mind!” Anne laughed as we stood at the corner on a Saturday night. Broadway was teeming with drunk guys, sailors on leave, and couples on the prowl for something more interesting than what they had already. I scanned the glowing signs. Roaring 20’s. Big Al’s. The Hungry I.
“This one!”
We ducked inside.
As we moved down the black hallway toward a red velvet curtain, I worried what someone else in the club might think. I, a woman, was in a strip club. As I pulled back the curtain, it dawned on me that wasn’t going to be an issue. There was one thing to which the men scattered at the small dimly lit tables around the room were paying attention, and it wasn’t me. It was the half-naked girl on the stage.
Nonchalantly, we took a seat at a table near the back. We ordered a couple of overpriced drinks. I took a sip: it was straight orange juice. The cocktails were alcohol-free, thanks to a California law that prohibited the sale of alcohol in fully nude strip clubs. It didn’t matter, my head was buzzing from the drinks we’d had at the bar around the corner that we’d been to earlier.
In the song that was blasting, Trent Reznor was expressing a desire to violate someone. The statuesque brunette teetering on the highest heels I had ever seen peeled off her dental-floss thin neon green thong. She tossed her thong to one side, grabbed the pole, climbed up it. High above the crowd, she wrapped her thighs around the pole and bent over backwards, throwing her arms open like an inverted angel.
In that moment, everything that had happened seemed far away. The intellectual, cloistered, academic world in which I had grown up was right across the Bay, but it may as well have been a million miles from here. I looked at a solitary businessman sitting at the next table. His tie was untied. His jacket was slung across the back of his chair. His eyes were glassy. He had been hypnotized. In this alternative universe, women had all the power, and men were at their mercy. I didn’t want to be a stripper; I was too shy, too insecure, too inhibited to take off my clothes in front of strangers. But I wanted what she had: the stage, the men in awe, the audience worshipping her as a superhuman goddess. As a kid, I was starved for attention. This was an orgy of attention. As a pre-pubescent girl, I felt embarrassed by my own burgeoning sexuality, left to figure it out for myself because my mother was too depressed. Here, sex was on parade, for sale, everywhere I looked. In the Block Project, I was the object, the one on view, the child studied by researchers from across tables in Tolman Hall’s austere experiment rooms. Now I was the voyeur, the looker, the scopophiliac. It was intoxicating.
As we sped back to the East Bay in the early morning hours, I watched the city get smaller and smaller in the side view mirror. My father was dead, that was an incontrovertible fact, but for a few hours tonight I had forgotten all about that. I could write about this. I could become a gonzo journalist, like one of my favorite writers, Hunter S. Thompson, and immerse myself in it. Sex would be my beat.
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Yesterday, I flew up to the Bay Area, where I was doing a brown bag book talk at U.C. Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. I got there early, and that gave me a chance to have breakfast, visit Pegasus Books where I was happy to see my book on a shelf, and go to my childhood home and knock on the front door (more on that in an upcoming post). After that, I went to Cal for the talk. I was interviewed by journalist and producer Cecilia Lei, who did a wonderful job asking insightful questions, turning what could have been bearing witness to a Q&A into a three-way dialogue with the audience, and prompting me to think about some of the deeper themes in and larger issues surrounding my book in new ways. Thank you to everyone who came. I’ve been doing a lot of promoting of my memoir this month, these last couple weeks in particular. After I’m done with the last event, which is this weekend, I’ll be writing a longer post about everything I learned about marketing one’s book. The photo is of the courtyard at the J-school. It was a bit overcast, but so are most days in the Bay Area in spring.
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What happens when one former child lab rat interviews another former child lab rat? Things get unhinged. Seth Fischer, who was himself studied as a child by his psychologist parents, and I talked about growing up under a microscope, the consequences of being a human guinea pig, and what happens when the subject sets out to tell his or her own story. Read the rest of our scintillating, strange conversation in the newest issue of Air/Light: “‘I Hate the Subject and the Subject Hates Me’: An Interview with Susannah Breslin.”
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I took this photo ahead of the panel I was on at this year’s Los Angeles Times Festival of Books before the room became full. The festival is on the University of Southern California campus, a massive undertaking, and run like a well-oiled machine. My friend and I hung out in the authors’ green room, we got marched over to the hall where the panel was along with the other panelists, and then I answered questions from the moderator and the audience. It was a really cool time and something I’ll be writing about a bit more in a future post. My book is Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experiment. And what people are saying about it is here.
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This weekend, I’ll be a panelist at The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. The panel, “Women and Bodies: Science Meets Sociology,” is on Sunday, April 21, at 3:30 pm., it’s moderated by Amy Alkon, and my fellow panelists are Dr. Jen Gunter, Cat Bohannon, and M.G. Lord. I’ll be talking about my memoir, Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experiment. And, you can read more about the story behind my book here.
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I was interviewed about my memoir, Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experiment (read more about my book here) for a recent episode of ABC Radio National’s podcast about the human mind, “All in the Mind,” out of Australia. The episode is “Being a Human Lab Rat for 30 Years: What Happens Next.”
From the episode’s description:
“Researchers knew Susannah better than her own parents.
They may have even known her better than herself.
Today, how spending thirty years in a psychological study warped journalist Susannah Breslin's life.”
Listen to my conversation with host Sana Qadar here.
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I’m super happy that The Morbidly Curious Book Club has chosen my memoir, Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experiment—you can read more about my book here—as the April pick! The Morbidly Curious Book Club is very cool, and I’m honored that Data Baby is in the company of their previous 2024 selections, which include Dark Archives: A Librarian's Investigation into the Science and History of Books Bound in Human Skin by Megan Rosenbloom, Lay Them to Rest: On the Road with the Cold Case Investigators Who Identify the Nameless by Laurah Norton, and Pathogenesis: A History of the World in Eight Plagues by Jonathan Kennedy. You can join TMCBC here, check out the rest of their 2024 selections and follow TMCBC on Instagram here, follow TMCBC on TikTok here, and find various other relevant links for TMCBC here, including a link to the podcast, for which I’ll be doing an interview later this month. Thank you, TMCBC!
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On Tuesday, April 23, 2024, at 1 pm, I’ll be doing a brown bag book talk in conversation with Cecilia Lei at U.C. Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism about my memoir, Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experiment. (You can read more about my book here.) I’m really looking forward to this event for several reasons. I grew up in Berkeley, my father was a professor at Cal, I graduated from Cal, my memoir is about my 30-year participation in a research study conducted at U.C. Berkeley, and as part of my research for my book I was at Cal for a year as an academic fellow at the Graduate School of Journalism’s Investigative Reporting Program. Event info here.
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Last Wednesday, I did a reading and talk for my memoir, Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experiment, at the North Branch of the Berkeley Public Library. I had such a nice time, especially because this was the library I went to when I was a kid, and I was reading from my book about growing up in Berkeley. It was a bit like time travel with a literary twist. Thank you to the library for having me and for all those who came out to listen and ask questions. If you’re interested in attending an event, I’m going to be doing several events during April for the book, which are listed here, and which include the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books; the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley; and Book Passage in Corte Madera.
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On Wednesday, March 27, 2024, I’m reading from and discussing my memoir, Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experiment, at Berkeley Public Library’s North Branch at 6:30 pm. You can read more about what people are saying about Data Baby here. More event information is here. Hope to see you!
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On Sunday, April 21, at 3:30 p.m., I’ll be on a panel at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. The panel is “Women and Bodies: Science Meets Sociology,” and tickets are required. My fellow panelists are Dr. Jen Gunter, Cat Bohannan, and M.G. Lord, and the moderator is Amy Alkon. I’ll be talking about my memoir, Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experiment; you can read more about my book here.
The panel description:
“It seems almost impossible that, in a year where a movie about an iconic doll broke nearly every record for success and female vocalists almost single-handedly boosted the economy with concert tours, there is still so much mystery, debate, contention, and law-making about women’s bodies. These writers share thought-provoking research and personal experience on everything from the role of female bodies in human evolution, to the gaps in medical knowledge about female reproductive systems and a 30+ year lab experiment about human personalities, and finally how all of this plays into the dolls we make to represent women. Though their stories differ, these writers are all experts in one extremely difficult field: being a woman.”
See you there!
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This is part 7 of “Fuck You, Pay Me,” an ongoing series of posts on writing, editing, and publishing. Read the rest of the series: Part 1: How To Become a Writer in 12 Easy Steps, Part 2: The Pros and Cons of Traditional vs. Indie Publishing, Part 3: Scenes From My Life Writing a Porn Novel, Part 4: Why I Hate Memoirs (but Wrote One Anyway), Part 5: 19 Ways to Make Money as a Writer, Part 6: Letters From Johns Revisited, Part 7: Some of My Favorite Things I’ve Ever Written (Journalism Edition), Part 8: Some of My Favorite Things I’ve Ever Written (Fiction Edition), Part 9: How to Promote Your Book Without Going Crazy, Part 10: The Pornification of My Life, Part 11: How to Be More Creative, Part 12: The Fine Art of Applying to Writing Residencies, Part 13: How to Be a Consultant, Part 14: Cranking the Flywheel, Part 15: Why You Should Have a Newsletter, Part 16: An Excerpt From My Memoir.
I thought I’d list some of my favorite things I’ve ever written in terms of journalism. In this list, I’ve excluded my books—my memoir, Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experiment; my short story collection, You’re a Bad Man, Aren’t You?; and my novel-in-progress, (which I’ll refer to here as) Untitled Porn Novel.
“They Shoot Porn Stars, Don’t They?” This is my 2009 long-form investigation of the Great Recession’s impact on the adult movie industry. Originally it was written for Slate’s Double X, when they were trying to turn Double X into a full-blown magazine that I think was described as something like the original Esquire but written by women. The editor wanted me to change my story in ways that I didn’t, I shopped it around and was unable to place it anywhere else because print magazines were nervous about running adult-themed content (some of it quite graphic) next to advertising that paid their bills, and I ended up self-publishing it (initially it lived on its own website, but I later moved it to my website). See also: “The Numbers on Self-Publishing Long-form Journalism.” I’m so glad I went this route instead of letting some editor trash it.
Standout quote: “As for the ‘sperm omelet,’ as everyone referred to it in awestruck tones, that was Jim’s idea, she told me.”
Year published and publisher: 2009, self-published
“How to Romance the Taller Woman.” I’m not saying this was my finest hour as a journalist, but this was the first story of mine that appeared in a glossy magazine. This story about how to date tall chicks (I’m six-foot-one) appeared in the December 1997 issue of Details. My editor was Duane Swierczynski, who is now a famous crime writer. The story was illustrated with the poster for the 1958 film The Attack of the 50-Foot Woman, which is maybe my all-time favorite movie poster. This story doesn’t exist online, but I bought the print version of the issue on eBay to replace the one that I lost somewhere along the way.
Standout quote: “Just because we’re tall doesn’t mean our genitals are as big as the Holland Tunnel.”
Year published and publisher: 1997, Details
“I Spent My Childhood as a Guinea Pig for Science. It Was … Great?” Speaking of Slate, last November this piece I wrote in conjunction with the release of my memoir appeared on the website. I wrote this story on spec, which is something I hate to do because I think it’s beneath me at this point in my career, but doing so gave me the opportunity to write my story how I wanted to write it. The editor was excellent. She had a light touch and came up with the title, which I think is brilliant and hilarious. This piece didn’t take me long to write; four days, I think. The only thing I don’t love is the image used with it, which is a stock image, that kid is maybe a boy, and I think those aren’t M&M’s but Skittles.
Standout quote: “Even when I was in a dangerous place, I could feel a connection between the study and me, like a gossamer thread spun from inside of it and wrapped around me.”
Year published and publisher: 2023, Slate
“Extreme Porn Crackdown.” Over two decades ago, I wrote this story for Salon about a series of LAPD busts in Porn Valley. I think this was the first time I wrote a big piece tackling an issue going on in the adult movie business. At the time, I was living in a one-bedroom apartment on the east side of Los Angeles. For some reason, various porn companies kept sending me VHS tapes (how one watched porn in those days), and my place was overflowing with them. Also I had a silicone vagina molded off a real porn star’s vagina that I kept in a hallway cupboard. As part of my research, I interviewed Seymore Butts at his home, and it just so happened that I had been on the set of an “American Bukkake” movie that was of interest to the LAPD. I remember seeing the story after the editor went through it and thinking what the fuck did he do, as he had changed it quite a bit, and then realizing he had made it quite a bit better.
Standout quote: “These days, it seems like the Los Angeles Police Department has got a thing for porn.”
Year published and publisher: 2001, Salon
“To the Max.” I find a lot of people who work in the porn industry pretty interesting, even people who do things other people would think are indefensible, but Max Hardcore was a pornographer I did not like. I use past tense here because he died last year. Back in 2008, I wrote a post about him on a blog I had at the time. That post, which I reposted here because people kept asking me about it, was entitled “To the Max,” and I wrote it a few days after Hardcore was sentenced to 46 months in prison after being found guilty of various obscenity charges brought by the Department of Justice’s Obscenity Prosecution Task Force. In the wake of the sentencing, the liberal and libertarian and independent-minded people of the internet were bellyaching about Hardcore’s sentence, wailing about their First Amendment rights being threatened. Glenn Greenwald was one of the loudest complainers, so I wrote him an email asking him if he had bothered to watch any of the Hardcore-created porn he was so busy defending (spoiler: he hadn’t), and then I wrote about why if you’re going to defend various types of extreme porn you might want to bother watching it first. I wish I could recall why years prior to this Hardcore had gotten pissed at me at some party in downtown Los Angeles or what he said to trash me to some reporter who visited him in prison, but I can’t. Anyway, my passion made the piece sing.
Standout quote: “Because if you're going to talk about how far we've come when it comes to porn, if you're going to posit Paul ‘Max Hardcore’ Little as the latest victim of the Bush administration, if you're going to lament one more strike against your First Amendment rights, you should bear witness as to what a porn star drenched in vomit looks like.”
Year published and publisher: 2008, my blog
“How the Biggest Strip Club in American Grinds.” For some time now I’ve been covering the business of sex on the Forbes website. In 2015, I was living in Southwest Florida and drove to the other side of the state to go to Tootsie’s Cabaret, which bills itself as the biggest strip club in America. Holy shit! I have been to a lot of strip clubs in my life, but I had never and have not since seen a place like this. I guess in Miami they just strip different. It’s 74,000 square feet! It has a 30-foot stripper pole! In a 24-hour period it might entertain 1,500 customers! On a weekend night, there may be 150 dancers working there! Anyway, it was fucking nuts, and I really enjoyed it, and I would like to go back someday.
Standout quote: “‘I like dancing a lot,’ she says. ‘I'm not shy. I have a lot of spunk.’”
Year published and publisher: 2015, Forbes.com
“Blood Sacrifice.” Around the same time, I wrote a story for the now defunct website The Billfold about how I flew from where I was living, Naples, Florida, to Chicago, Illinois, to have a $350 dinner. My friend had invited me, and the restaurant was Grant Achatz’s Next, and what was I going to do, say no? (I was not.) The tale involves the consumption of canard à la presse and getting over breast cancer and fantasies about meeting your heroes. This took place during a period in my life that feels so far away now. I was married, and now I am divorced. I was living in Florida, and now I live in California. I was fresh out of having survived breast cancer, and now I am a decade-plus survivor. Sometimes it’s good to write about things that are complicated because you can see how far you’ve come later.
Standout quote: “He would smile knowingly at me, and I would smile knowingly at him, and then he would disappear into the kitchen, and he would emerge with a plate of something that looked like a tumor splattered across porcelain, and I would eat it, and whatever it was made of (rhubarb? venison? something else entirely?), it would be delicious, and I would have eaten the tumor that had tried to eat me, metaphorically, of course, and the cycle of life would close upon itself, completing itself, like Ouroboros with his tail in his mouth rolling down a street like a wheel.”
Year published and publisher: 2015, The Billfold
“Porn’s Uncanny Valley.” How has tech transformed porn? I’m sure I seemed like the perfect writer to write this story which is why an editor at The Atlantic reached out to me to write it. I can’t recall what was asked of me, but it was something about like the landscape of (Virtual?) Porn Valley? Anyway, I ended up experiencing virtual reality porn for the first time, and, man, was that weird. I don’t mention it in the story, but when I was at the VR porn guy’s office, and I was watching the VR porn with the VR headset, I had this weird, visceral urge to punch the VR porn performer in the virtual world in the face. After I took off the headset, I related this to the VR porn guy, and he said something to the effect of, yeah, a lot of people have that experience. I have no fucking idea why, but there you go.
Standout quote: “‘It’s a phantom-limb penis syndrome,’ said a tall, British man who goes by the name Adam Sutra.”
Year published and publisher: 2017, The Atlantic
“Everyone Has a Pervert Hidden Inside of Them.” A few years ago, I started going to estate sales. My maternal grandmother was a very successful antiques dealer, so maybe that is part of why I do this. Pretty quickly I noticed that when you’re pawing through the things the dead have left behind, you get a very intimate view of them. Sometimes you get to see what they kept hidden from the rest of the world. Occasionally, those secrets are sexual in nature. In this edition of my newsletter, The Reverse Cowgirl, I wrote about what that’s like and some of the things I’ve found, among them: small handmade penis sculptures, binders of autographed porn star photos, forgotten sex toys. It’s like nostalgia, but X-rated.
Standout quote: “A woman had spent her days painting these penises, sculpting these phalluses, drawing these nudes.”
Year published and publisher: 2022, The Reverse Cowgirl
“The Graduate of Porn Star High.” This was such a fascinating story to write, back in 2001. An editor at Arena magazine in the UK had heard about this Staten Island high schooler who had gotten a famous porn star to go to his prom with him (thanks to Howard Stern), and then the high schooler and the porn star had started dating, and the editor wanted me to write a profile of them and their relationship. For some reason, I wrote this piece in a more experimental way, using the second person and also interweaving block quotes and the text of the story itself. The editor was so enthusiastic about what I had written; it was such a delightful experience. I believe I sold the story to other markets that approached me, as well, in Europe, I think, and maybe Australia or Asia or something.
Standout quote: “It was like he was in the porn star twilight zone.”
Year published and publisher: 2001, Arena
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Love this Instagram post from @bookswithbrady featuring my memoir, Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experiment. Buy my book here, order a signed copy here, and read what people are saying about it here.
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Porn star, Las Vegas, NV | Photo credit: Susannah Breslin
This week in my newsletter I share an excerpt from my memoir, Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experiment. This episode takes place early on in the book. I believe it was 1997 or thereabouts. At the time I was living in the Bay Area, where I grew up. On this particular night, I ventured out to the strip clubs in North Beach in San Francisco. It would prove to be a fateful series of events.
I thought it would be interesting to write about the strip clubs in the North Beach neighborhood of San Francisco. I was curious about these enigmatic clubs on Broadway that I had seen but never entered. As a kid in the back seat of my parents’ Dart, I had been driven through San Francisco and spotted The Condor (which, in 1964, became one of the country’s first topless bars). Out front, a towering sign featured a supersized blonde, impossibly busty. Her name, I would find out later, was Carol Doda. On the sign, she wore a black bikini with blinking red lights for nipples.
Doda was the opposite of my mother and her friends, who considered makeup, heavily styled hair, and revealing clothes tools the patriarchy used to subjugate and objectify women. But Doda wasn’t anyone’s tool; she was a legend. She was America’s first topless dancer of note, and her surgically enhanced breasts were billed as “the new Twin Peaks of San Francisco.” When I was in graduate school, I had seen an episode of HBO’s Real Sex about strippers, and I was struck by the revelation that strip clubs were places where intimacy was for sale. Sure, it was transient, transactional, and most often conducted between a guy with a handful of dollar bills and a dancer in a G-string and not much else who twirled seductively around a pole on a stage, but there was something real about it. The strippers reminded me of the girls I had hung out with in high school, whom everyone else had deemed slutty.
“Oh my god, Susannah, make up your mind!” Anne laughed as we stood at the corner on a Saturday night. Broadway was teeming with drunk guys, sailors on leave, and couples on the prowl for something more interesting than what they had already. I scanned the glowing signs. Roaring 20’s. Big Al’s. The Hungry I.
“This one!” We ducked inside. As we moved down the black hallway toward a red velvet curtain, I worried what someone else in the club might think. I, a woman, was in a strip club. As I pulled back the curtain, it dawned on me that wasn’t going to be an issue. There was one thing the men scattered at the small, dimly lit tables around the room were paying attention to, and it wasn’t me. It was the half-naked girl on the stage.
Nonchalantly, we took a seat at a table near the back. We ordered a couple of overpriced drinks. I took a sip: It was straight orange juice. The cocktails were alcohol-free, thanks to a California law that prohibited the sale of alcohol in fully nude strip clubs. It didn’t matter; my head was buzzing from the drinks we’d had at the bar around the corner.
In one smooth movement, the statuesque brunette dancer teetering on the highest heels I had ever seen peeled off her dental-floss-thin neon-green thong. She tossed the thong to one side, grabbed the pole, climbed up it. High above the crowd, she wrapped her thighs around the pole and bent over backward, throwing her arms open like an inverted angel.
The academic world in which I had grown up was right across the Bay, but it may as well have been a million miles from where I was. I studied a solitary businessman sitting at the next table. His tie was untied. His jacket was slung across the back of his chair. His eyes were glassy. He had been hypnotized. In this world, women had all the power, and men were at their mercy. I didn’t want to be a stripper; I was too shy, too insecure, too inhibited to take off my clothes in front of strangers. But I wanted what she had: the stage, the audience in awe, the men gawking at her. As a kid, I had longed for attention. This was an orgy of attention. As a pubescent teen, I was left to figure out my sexuality for myself because my mother was so unhappy. Here, sex was on parade, for sale, everywhere I looked. In the Block Project, I was the object, the one on view, the child studied by researchers from across tables in Tolman Hall’s austere experiment rooms. Now I was the voyeur, the looker, the scopophiliac. It was intoxicating.
As we sped back to the East Bay in the early-morning hours, I watched the city get smaller in the side-view mirror. My father was dead, but for a few hours I had forgotten about that. I could write about this. I could be a gonzo journalist, like one of my favorite writers, Hunter S. Thompson, and immerse myself in it. Sex would be my beat.
Buy Data Baby here. Read more about my book here. Listen to an interview with me here.
(This post originally appeared in my newsletter, The Reverse Cowgirl: “What Carol Doda Taught Me.”)
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The Bay | Photo credit: Susannah Breslin
I have a few upcoming readings for my memoir, Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experiment, in the San Francisco Bay Area. On March 27, 2024, at 6:30 pm, I’ll be reading at Berkeley Public Library’s North Branch, in Berkeley, CA: “Author Talk with Susannah Breslin.” And, on April 27, 2024, at 11 am, I’ll be reading at Book Passage, in Corte Madera, CA: “Susannah Breslin - Data Baby : My Life in a Psychological Experiment (Corte Madera Store).” Buy my book here, read more about it here, and listen to me talk about it here.
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